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“... exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and Tynemarch did not return my call. But here is what Martin Kane, Severn Trent’s director of customer relations, said in an interview with Radio Gloucestershire shortly after the floods: ‘The risk of flood defences being breached at the Mythe was – I think it was something like a one in a thousand chance of ...”

“... source – MacSweeney has often used a pastiche-medieval register for particular effects, in ‘Wolf Tongue’ (1978), for example, he faked an excellent version of Thomas Chatterton’s (already fake) mode. Another poem in his ambit is probably Douglas Oliver’s The Infant and the Pearl (1985), a dream-allegorical confrontation in which malign powers are ...”

“... that is half hungry, half mysterious, and a little breeze runs through the streets like a wolf, whistling between the houses.’ When the young Victorita agrees to sell her body to ‘the usurer’ for thirty thousand pesetas, ‘there was a disgusting breeze in the room, moving round slowly, touching every piece of furniture, like a dying ...”

“... Hemingway shot himself. His death is the only regret of my magnificent career.’ The cartoonist Martin Rowson got the last laugh in the Independent on Sunday, with a riff on the ‘body of literature’: ‘And yet where are Publishers in this Corporeal Plan?/You’ll see them as a TAPEWORM if you do a CT scan.’ Alongside these lines was a caricature of ...”

“... the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable disloyalty. An article appeared in Izvestia under the name of Serge Lifar, the same Lifar who had awarded Nureyev the Nijinsky Prize: ‘He has become a star by sheer virtue of the fact that he is a ...”

“... his weird compulsions and his sister’s suicide, as written up in Freud’s case history ‘The Wolf Man’. In Freud’s view, the Wolf Man’s story was easily resolved, a classic allegory of Oedipal trauma; but for later critics (Abraham and Torok, Deleuze and Guattari), the case dramatises the inadequacy of the ...”

“... In poetry, drama and fiction, writers followed the new formal rules laid down by the Silesian poet Martin Opitz in his Buch von der Teutschen Poetery (1624) and brought about a national literary revival. They wrote in a vivid and dynamic style, with larger than life characters and supernatural occurrences. But the rhetorical flourishes that worked well for ...”

“... Martin Amis’s newest book, House of Meetings, is a short novel that purportedly describes conditions inside a Soviet forced labour camp. A sick and malingering prisoner is confined to an isolation chamber, where he squats on a bench for a week over ‘knee-deep bilge’. A blind-drunk guard, a woman-beater, spends the night outside at forty degrees below – and wakes up, frost-mangled, without any hands ...”

“... up. ‘Gie me blues, blues electric’: Jerry is a blues aficionado (though he thinks Howlin’ Wolf is called ‘Howling Wolf’), and while the live band is preparing to play he makes up his own lyrics. In one sense, the novel is Jerry Brown’s Talking Blues, a long moan that covers all the bases. How his woman left ...”

“... will suddenly transform herself into snow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and titles are innumerable.’ All true poems are invocations of this volatile ‘Mother of All-Living’, and their effect is immediate – ‘the hair stands on end, the eyes water, the throat is ...”

“... his violent impulses through more traditional media, developing an all-consuming obsession with Martin Scorsese’s mafia movies, to the extent that when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up he’d say ‘a made guy’. Being the reconstructed man I am, I eventually took him on a monitory tour of Sicily that included plenty of famous hit ...”

“... This Dracula, more than any other I can recall, is a creature of transformations. He is not only a wolf, a man-beast, a mist, a Renaissance warrior and an aged queen, he is a genuinely terrifying, giant-sized gargoyle and a column of rats. Travelling to London, he assumes the form of his younger self and becomes, more mildly and convincingly than Lugosi, a ...”

“... the closure of the studio marked the end of an epoch truncated by the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King: ‘the climate for an integrated business in a black neighbourhood changed.’ You can see what Marcus is talking about when he says the civil rights movement looks different in retrospect – but not because of anything to do with Elvis ...”

“... on Convoy 69. On page 1043 is a snapshot of two Jewish boys boxing at a sports club at the Saint-Martin-de-Vésubie station in the Alpes-Maritimes; nine other boys crowd around. Only one, Isaac More, bare-chested and wearing short trousers, is identified. (He is shown in a colourful tunic on the tomb picture above the snapshot.) But who are the other ...”

“... the book is a Geoffrey Hill parody which pictures Hill playing tennis against his devoted admirer Martin Dodsworth: Who crouches at the net, his mouth compressed Severely to a little Gothic slit? On the whole, though, the book falls well short of its pre-match billing. Most of the poems are too long, and too many of the jokes fall flat. Humour supposed to ...”